They brought the hammer down on me one visit when my daughter was 2. They had this step stool that was the perfect height for my daughter to be able to see everything that was going on and to help. My grandmother and Aunt Mollye didn’t want a toddler ‘helping’ in their kitchen.

Our little cooking school vibe shut down for the course of the visit. Except for early in the morning. Ever since she was weaned at 18 months, my daughter would get up at 5 for breakfast. Gracious hostess that she was, my grandmother couldn’t stand to have her guests cooking when she could cook for them. She got up and insisted on making the malt-o-meal.

The only problem was, I used the microwave. I had preparing hot cereal in the microwave down to a science, and my grandmother couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The microwave was ‘oh, that’ in her kitchen—the dusty, but new, unused appliance sent by my mother as an unwanted Christmas present. I, who had always had the reputation of a non-cook crossed some kind of invisible line that day. I had outdone my grandmother. Now, 14 years later, I can still see her struggling trying to stir the thick porridge.

Now my daughter and I have that kind of poetry in the kitchen. She makes the dessert, I make the main dish, she seasons it. One night I’ll make the bread, another night she’ll make the bread. Our dance is getting ever more graceful, the camaraderie in the kitchen grows ever sweeter. Then, one of the little girls wants to cut in.

Now that I have more cooking skills, I’m more tempted to tell them I don’t need the help, but I like the company sometimes, so I welcome their ‘help’ too. And my daughter acts like her great grandmother and tries to block them from ‘her kitchen.’ She’ll be dethroned one day, too. It happens to us all.